Business Daily (Nairobi)
Francis Okomo-Okello
6 May 2008
document
Abridged version of a speech delivered at the brand launch of the Strathmore Business School (SBS), Strathmore University, Nairobi.
What role should business management and leadership play in helping Africa to meet the development challenges it faces today?
My article is premised on the hypothesis that quality business management and leadership is absolutely essential for Africa's economic development and growth, and that the low levels and lack of sustainable wealth creation in Africa is directly attributable to failure in management and leadership.
I will review Africa's leadership quotient, identify some specific management and leadership gaps, and suggest possible remedial measures that can be taken. Exposing failure in business management and leadership as the underlying reason for Africa's poor development performance track record.
Let me begin by wrestling with a paradox: Why should Africa be experiencing such low rates of wealth creation and yet the continent is so resource rich? Why should Africa fall short of achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals? As a prelude to answering these basic questions, let us remind ourselves about Africa's well documented resource base.
In his book Africa in Chaos, Prof. George B.N. Ayittey notes that Africa is a continent with immense untapped mineral wealth (base and precious minerals). He notes that Africa has "40 per cent of the world's potential hydroelectric power; the bulk of the world's diamonds and chromium; 30 per cent of uranium in the free world; 50 per cent of the world's gold; 90 per cent of its cobalt among others.
Africa also accounts for 70 per cent of cocoa, 60 per cent of coffee, 50 per cent of palm oil, and 20 per cent of the total petroleum traded in the world market, excluding USA and Russia.
The tourism potential is enormous, unrivalled wildlife, scenic grandeur, and pristine ecology constitutes Africa's third greatest natural resource after agriculture and mineral wealth.
Prof Ayittey notes that in sharp contrast, according to the 2006 UN Human Development Report, as interpreted in the Merrill Lynch Thematic Investing Report: Africa, the final frontier of the 31 countries ranked by the UN HDI as "low" in terms of human development, 28 are in Africa with only 12 being ranked as "medium" and only one (Mauritius) having reached the lofty status of " high".
In terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP) measures, almost two -thirds of African countries remain below the $2,000 level per capita GDP notwithstanding the windfalls associated with the commodity price boom witnessed during the last several years.
On the health front, according to the UN report, about 40 million people across the globe were living with HIV in 2006, up 2.6 million or seven per cent from 2004. As for infant mortality rates across the world when viewed in terms of proportion of newborns dying before age one (per 1,000), according to the UN World Population Prospects (the 2006 revision), Africa has the dubious distinction of scoring 90 against 46 for Asia, eight for Europe, 23 for Latin America and six for North America and 27 for Oceania. Why such a depressing picture and scenario?
To get an honest answer, let us travel to Nigeria and have a brief chat with that great African novelist Chinua Achebe, who in his book The Trouble With Nigeria observes that: "The trouble with Nigeria (read Africa) is simply and squarely a failure of leadership".
There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership...We have lost the 20th century; are we bent on seeing that our children also lose the 21st century.
We are all aware of the many explanations or rather excuses we often hear that seek to explain Africa's low score in the economic development and growth agenda. These vary from blaming everything on colonialism, imperialism or neocolonialism, civil wars, poor weather, lack of resources to a lop sided international trading regime.
We are also aware that there are raging arguments all over Africa and around the world between the so called 'internalists' and 'externalists' whose major preoccupation is to diagnose whether Africa's unsatisfactory performance is caused by internal or external/exogenous factors.
However, as we continue to argue amongst ourselves and as we listen to others argue, former colonies such as Mauritius, Korea, India, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand , some of which are our age mates in terms of colonial and independence history, have their economies firing from all pistons. While we are blaming civil wars for Africa's unsatisfactory state of economic development and growth, Vietnam, after unprecedented civil strife, is finding its feet and charging forward and while we are blaming nature for bad weather, the United Arab Emirates is showing that nature can be tamed.
As Achebe correctly observes, the problem with Africa's state of low capacity to create wealth is poor management and leadership. This is why the debate around the theme: "Business Management & Leadership; Taking Africa Forward" should seriously concern all of us.
"Business Management and Leadership" should be understood in their ordinary meaning as the need to develop business management and leadership skills that are required to efficiently and competitively run Africa's Public and Private sectors so as to optimise wealth creation in the increasingly competitive globalised economy for the benefit of the Continent and its citizenry.
This article ignores the technical distinction usually drawn between "management" and "leadership" and proceeds on the basis that "leadership" is the foundation while "management" is an off shoot of leadership. Management or the art of managing is about execution, administration, directing etc. while leadership is mainly driven by strategic vision of the direction which the businesses which are being managed should take.
We therefore focus on the foundational and proceed on the basis that although there is no agreed definition of the term "leadership", there is a sense in which it can be reasonably argued that a leader is a person who has the capacity and capability to mobilise or galvanise people to realize a common goal aimed at achieving public or common good by producing socially useful outcomes but all the while observing the core values which society holds dear.
Let's turn to the familiar debate: "leaders are born and not made." Here we make the argument that as is the case with any other form of skills, management and leadership, skills can be both cognitive and acquisitive. Leadership can be acquired through learning and adaptation.
As Nelson Mandela has aptly observed: "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world". Indeed, Ronald Heifetz, the Harvard scholar makes the same observation when he criticises the common personalistic orientation to the term leadership as being based on the misleading assumption that leaders are born and not made.
As a good friend and colleague, Ali- Mufuruki, the current Chairman of the Africa Leadership Initiative (ALI)-East Africa Foundation correctly observes: "Many people never exercise leadership, even though they have the personal qualities we might commonly associate with it." By unbundling leadership from personality traits, we permit observations of many different ways in which people exercise leadership every day without necessarily being "leaders". Different leaders in history saw leadership differently.
For example, Winston Churchill, the premier statesman who led Britain victoriously through the World War II, sees leadership as "taking responsibility, facing adversity, dealing with failure, making tough choices with courage, keeping an open mind and effective communication" among others.
Mandela, the paragon of virtue, sees leadership as modesty, tolerance, courage, selfless service to others and determination, among other qualities; qualities that have elevated him to a state of reverence and of being a world icon.
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